How a four-day workweek works, from the companies pulling it off
wsj.com
wsj.com
One thing I feel like a lot of people don't realize is just how big a difference it is to go from a 5-day week to a 4-day week. Sure, it's "just one day" but when you think about the ratio between time-on and time-off, the shift becomes a lot more dramatic. 5-on, 2-off means you spend over twice as many days working as not working. 4-on, 3-off means you spend a nearly equal number of days on each. It's just one day of difference, but it feels like a major, major shift.
It seems more likely that people would retain a similar ratio of slacking to working.
As an aside, how does "I finish my work in 32 hours" even work? What does that mean? Are most developers out there getting paint-by-numbers printouts they need to color in and then they're all done for the week? Almost all of my roles in a professional capacity have required self-starting, and the project life cycles are much longer than a day/week such that there is literally always work to do.
If you're building a house and you're done nailing in shingles by noon you don't go home and come back tomorrow, you go put up sheetrock or install bathroom tiles. The "I finish my work in a few hours" that I see on HN and Twitter must be extremely poorly managed teams or people that are leaving a lot of work on the rest of their teammates.
I've managed work in software, marketing, robotics and construction. In every field I have had to send people home to rest who were doing more harm than good with their tired decision-making. Doing the work that was set for the day and going home to rest is a great productivity and morale boost, in my opinion.
Individual work capacity varies, but in my experience most people overestimate theirs by a lot.
There are many counter examples against this statement. Stephen King writes every day with no breaks, not even on Sundays.
Personal work capacity will vary. Who knows, maybe he'd write better books if he wrote less? We'll likely never know.
Second, creatives have to consider the long term as well. Burnout and writer's block are real phenomenon.
Lastly, yes. Some people are just built different. Maybe you min max exercise and diet and can operate longer than an equally skilled peer. Maybe you have less family responsibilities and truly enjoy your work. These factors tend to target the average, not the top.
Got it in one. Humans are creatures of habit. You (yes you, oh 10x HN reader) reading this may actually be hyperaware enough to analyse your weeks work and stuff it into 4 days, but I strongly suspect the vast majority of workers would coast the same amount (whatever that number may be) regardless of days worked.
Either way, no one is expecting 100% productivity. Or at least, they shouldn't. The question is more on a long range than week by week. Does an employee with a 4 day work week require less days off? Will the motivated ones spend more time on growth with added free time? Will retention increase? These are less opaque factors that should be considered, even if modern corporate culture doesn't value them.
My concern is that people are consciously avoiding slacking off during the trial period but will later return to their long-run productivity once they grow accustomed to 32 hour weeks.
The other concern I have with these studies, is that these companies appear to be overstaffed in the first place. While we all have some amount of slack during our days, I doubt anyone in my team has enough slack available to get the same amount of work done in 4 days.
I’d want to see a long term study that involves lean companies and people in leas-creative roles before buying into the hype.
My perfect 4-day workweek is having the Wednesday off so I have a 'mini-weekend' in my week. I only ever have to work 1 more day until I have some time to clear my head, make some music, etc. It feels like a more healthy work/life balance. And I feel sharper after a day off.
A three day weekend is great for a trip. Hump day off is great for a break. Either could be good for an extra day of big exercise/recovery or deep cleaning my house.
And then if working on either day, I get a full day of heads-down time.
That said, I wish we could go to MT and ThF schedule. Only ever have 2 days in a row with out a break would seem pretty magical to me. I'd either had yesterday off, or tomorrow - always. Fridays are such a slower day though that I feel like I miss out on less than I would on Wednesdays.
Ideally though the 4-day program shouldn't be a thing only for specific teams because the "that team isn't here" side-eye quickly promotes resentment of the "lobsters pulling other lobsters back into the pot" variety.
Teams that need coverage during the full work-week (such as B2B support) should normalize having two schedules which overlap, just as B2C companies have weekend shifts (they don't just force people to work 7 days to achieve this).
Sadly, management mostly worked us 4-and-1s because, despite the fact that each day we were less productive, over 3 months more trees would get planted in less time.
4-and-1s of gruelling manual labour inevitably leads to burn out. It did every season without fail, and we all expected it. Burnout was a built-in condition. The key here is that labour tolerated it only because the work was seasonal. There was always an end in sight. And most folks spent the off-season on a beach somewhere it was cheap enough to live off the earnings, surfing and eating tacos all day (or the equivalent activity).
The salaryperson should not accept burn out as a built-in; we are labourers for life and we need to learn how to find dignity in such a reality. When I first transitioned to a salaried worker, I brought the burn out mentality to my work and had a lot of pride in that. And though full of bride, the burnt out husk that I as had little dignity.
Ratios that allow for more life and less labour is that dignity.
Just because that is true for you doesn't mean it is true in general. Like, imagine a surgeon -- would he/she spend 8 hours a week slacking? Or a radiologoist -- can he/she read the same number of slides in 32 than 40? Or a barrista at starbucks?
Also, if you worked 32 hours, would you still slack off? Is there a reason to expect that your slack/work ratio would change? You claim you'd be "in a better mood" -- but as humans we tend to adjust to the circumstances we are in. So I'm not sure that would be the case long term.
https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/3-day-work-week-wit...
I suspect you’ve pulled “surgeon” from you-know-where on account of it being a high-status, high-value role. But don’t bring that baggage into the conversation.
In many ways it's a good analogy to writing code 40 hours a week. It takes high concentration and the quality of output drops heavily when you're tired or need a break or rest.
https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/how-many-hours-do-doctors-....
Your second point is definitely valid. Changing habits is really hard, and some of us are able to get by while spending very little time doing work because we work so much more quickly than the average drone.
In development at least, most of the times I hear this, the "availability" is only needed for random unplanned meetings from useless managers that can't actually plan or work asynchronously.
The organization as a whole or individual managers can't do their jobs well and they make the people that actually get shit done pay for it by "standing by" for no good reason.
Ironically, they also completely ruin productivity with these interruptions.
Really? Because it's pretty routine for me to get pinged on IRC/slack/whatever by another engineer who's looking for help with something. Obviously I set the expectation that I'm not going to be able to instantly reply to every ping so some things are going to have to be async, but there's definitely a lot more than just managers that could ping me.
The vast majority of time in my career, if you have a minimum amount of decent planning, you won't get blocked because you can't talk to another person immediately. And on healthy organizations, even if you do get blocked, you can simply work on something else while that particular task is blocked.
If you really scrutinize all these availability claims, they pretty much all come down to lack of planning.
Planning for blockers, planning for communication gaps, planning for maximizing asynchronous work, planning for decisions that require specific people, etc.
So many people are horrified by the word "blocked" when it's most times an artificial block created by their own systems. If I can't move forward on something, I'll start on something else and come back to the other one later.
We are all intentional about _over communicating_ what we are working on and where we will need support from from each other. Everything else pretty much just flows naturally from that. There are (rare) times were I cannot progress on something that day because I need feedback from someone who will not be online for 10 more hours, but it is just a built-in assumption that this will happen and I always have other work queued up that I can do if I get stuck....
That's why when we were all colocated in one building, I was logged out. I made it clear they were welcome to drop by my cube whenever they wanted, but I would not be available by IM. It cut the interrupts by half, easily. People use you as a crutch. When you raise the cost even minimally, they are suddenly willing to solve their own problems.
That's the one aspect that COVID destroyed. Now I have to be online as people can't just walk to my cube.
Logging out of IM when busy is a simpler skill :-)
And, of course, you're ignoring training costs which are usually a big factor in companies that aren't incompetent. That Senior Dev that's 15% above marketing asking rate but who knows your system inside and out... do you really want to spend six years training a (potentially highly proficient) newbies on all your systems and the subtle intricacies. And how long will it be until you, the manager, trust that new Senior Dev like you did the old? How many fires will you both need to walk through until you see an availability alert and just trust the Senior Dev either is dealing with it or would be ringing your phone if they need extra resources?
It can take quite a while to get a new employee (again, even a highly proficient one) to that place where in a meet your product team can be going over a proposal and your Senior Dev raises there hand and proceeds to calmly explain the incompatibility with the current system and how much it will cost to overcome those incompatibilities - and if they remain silent then you know they've done those calculations and consider it in hand.
Hiring a replacement is an extremely complicated calculations that most companies just punt on - for good reason.
>but I bet you're not as irreplaceable as you might believe.
Given all the tech layoffs, maybe. But I think that has more to do with lacking either the money or interest to invest in certain products given economic forecasts.
The fact that your typical tech interview is a month+ and at least 3 (usually 5 or more) rounds of interviews suggest that it's not trivial to replace a dev. Tech is probably middle of the road to train, which is why they'd rather grab interns from college instead of setting up apprenticeships that can fine tailor towards the exact business needs.
History has shown that it's not easy at all to replace someone. It's difficult to find good people and convince them to join you and it can take a long time. If you can write code, you should always have the upper hand on your employer especially if your co-workers also realize that.
My primary care doc has an assistant whose only job is to follow her around and input data into the electronic medical records system.
There are countless blog posts from doctors complaining that a 1/3rd of their time is spent on redundant paperwork.
For a related humorous take on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFGLDcTKFIY
Don't many surgeons only work a handful of weeks per year?
They're essentially already on a much better model.
Work hours in a 5-day work week: 40
Difference: 32 hours
Leisure hours in a 4-day work week: 80
Work hours in a 4-day work week: 32
Difference: 48 hours
You - "That’s the diffence."
No matter what kind of math you do, working one day less doesn’t give you two extra days off.
Sounds like someone needs some more tasks for their to do list. I have to abandon about half of the tasks I am meant to do, for lack of time. I can send you some of them to fill that eight hours.
Who here actually works a 40-hour week? HN isn't a bunch of union factory workers punching timecards each day. I'd bet 60 is more common than 40.
Sure, if there is a corresponding pay increase for those tasks.
I would consider whether your employer is trying to normalize 60 hours to exploit you, rather than it actually reflecting reality.
[0] https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#work-hours-wo...
> Old Life: Attorney
All the lawyers I know are basically married to their jobs. I think workaholism is just part of law culture
Tech, not as much. There are certainly unicorns that probably became billionaires after burning years of midnight oil, but many tech ventures fail, regardless of the experience involved. There is always a need for a lawyer, meanwhile.
I wouldn't do all that overtime on a gamble, and I argue you don't even need to do overtime to win such a gamble in tech.
Uhh, I did? First job I had a total of 5 weeks of OT. 2nd job never had to work above 8 hours a day, de facto nor de jure. I even had a 4 day experiment for 4 months there and it was lovely. Third job, no overtime.
Did I do some extra hours here and there off the clock? Sure. Especially with wfh I can get fixated and want to spend a bit of time getting something compileable. But outside of that one OT period listed above, I never worked above 50 hours.
I used to work 4 days a week but there was absolutely no reduction in workload compared to a 5 day role and plenty of meetings scheduled on my day off.
It was great working 4 days; Wednesdays were my day off and every Tuesday afternoon would have a bit of a "Friday feeling" and I was never more than two days away from a day off. Plus I could go to the psychologist and doctor and so on.
When I went back to 5 days a week, my workload was identical and my output was identical. Stress levels were not hugely different because I just slacked off more with the 5 days.
The impact of moving from 5 days to 4 days for a knowledge worker is probably a bit less than you would expect in every respect. Stress was not drastically reduced (I did school run and pickup on the Wednesday so it was only about 4.5 hours extra), and there was no huge change to my performance, probably just an increase in quality and efficiency.
mkaic
I am a firm believer that I would get more work done with a 3-day workweek than I currently do with my 4-day workweek. I already spend an embarrassing amount of time slacking off daily, it's not like I'm pressed for time to get stuff done in the office. I could easily meet my weekly objectives in 24 hours rather than 32, and having 4-day weekends every weekend I think would be incredible for my mental health and mood. And when I'm in a better mood, I get more work done!
One thing I feel like a lot of people don't realize is just how big a difference it is to go from a 4-day week to a 3-day week. Sure, it's "just one day" but when you think about the ratio between time-on and time-off, the shift becomes a lot more dramatic. 4-on, 3-off means you spend over twice as many days working as not working. 3-on, 4-off means you spend a nearly equal number of days on each. It's just one day of difference, but it feels like a major, major shift.
But you didn't edit this sentence:
> 4-on, 3-off means you spend over twice as many days working as not working.
Which now doesn't make sense. Proving that it's _not_ as simple as a slippery slope.
That "should" is a government creature; to the market, on the other hand, advances in technology "should" only increase productivity when (preferably now less) people are working the same amount of time (and maybe how about even more time?).
Also if youre a business that is basically a team for hire to a client who works 5 days a week, what do you tell them when they come up with some valid but urgent request during "normal" business time and that key person isn't there because they've already done their 40 hours. "Sorry we'll have to pick that up next week" very often doesn't fly with them ("what do you mean that person only does 4 days a week, we need that thing done today" is not a conversation I want to have). I cannot always afford to hire more people to cover that unicorn 10x team member who wants to work 4 days.
A store isn't a baby, one employee isn't needed 24/7 to keep the lights on.
Picking all the oranges from a grove takes eight hours today. Maybe I can do it in six hours if...
Turning an inbox worth of papers takes eight hours today. Maybe I can do it in six hours if...
Keeping the store open for eight hours takes eight hours today. It will always take eight hours. Because the hours are part of the output.
It's not about output, it's about quality of life and not making people work their lives away for corporate billionaires. If you need more manpower than a full time working hours, said billionaire corporations pay more for it in overtime or reduce hours.
To go off your metaphors, you (the corporation) can pick oranges, in the grove in 6 hours if you hire more skilled labor. If that's not possible (or if said labor is too expensive), you hire more people to make it possible. If a store needs to stay open for 8 hours with 6 hour workers, you pay 2 hours overtime or pay for two employees with overlapping shifts. Pay for your labor.
On bad codebases, it's simply not physically possible to work 40 hrs/wk and not burn out, so people find all kinds of ways to cut down on hours working, either by goofing off, or going for long coffee breaks, or playing ping pong or whatever.
A 4 day week would be way more effective in these cases. The problem, as usual, is management. They just cannot get over the hurdle that their job is to maximise company performance, not to crack whips.
They aren't stupid but companies are inherently risk averse. And short of a global pandemic companies won't want to change what they don't see as broken.
https://youtu.be/hvk_XylEmLo?si=uOTc3ndf87enwrZK
TL;DR we work a LOT more hours now than substance farmers did. They worked 4-6 hours a day and only worked about half of the days out of the year.
It's not hard. You just declare Friday a weekend. Then you do everything like before.
Did you have meetings on weekends? No? Good, move the Friday ones to another day because they're on the weekend now. Who is going to answer customer support emails on Friday? The same people who answered on Saturday and Sunday, and maybe you'll pay them extra work on the weekend. What if we can't get everything done? You probably weren't getting everything done before, and you either worked on Saturday or just said screw it. Do the same thing.
The only slightly reasonable issue brought up was the lawyers who wanted to work four days but kept having to go to court on Friday. Yes, if you work with external entities, you either have to be willing to say no to working on Friday or if you can't, you have to wait for them to also move to four days. But very few people are actually in a position where they can't say no to the client (the lawyer being one of the few exceptions).
The WSJ wants to make it sound like a massive undertaking because they are pro-business and anti-worker. Don't buy the hype.
Yea, I agree with this. As the lawyer, when the court asks you your preferred dates for scheduling something, don't give them a Friday.
If the Court asks you to schedule something on a Friday, you could politely request it moved to another day. If the Court says: "too bad, this Court works Fridays, and I'm going to schedule something for Friday", then you show up on Friday. Exactly the same way that you would if the Court said: "I'm going to schedule something for a Saturday".
Current metric fuzzes reality and allows for persuasion against 35 work weeks because people think they are only working 40 hours a week.
To be far, I find 9:00-17:00 to be a destructive cookie-cut mentality too. Prefer having about 12 hours of continual time when implementing a new feature or working a new solution. This allows for laying out the solution and better refactoring to make it cleaner. 9:00 to 17:00 does not allow for this because continual thoughts have to be shelved for the next day which takes more energy and time to try and rev-up again to continue where one left off.
To be far, a CEO or President or Owner or Manager seeing you in the office is a social engineering hack. "They are there so they must be doing work, I'm getting what I payed for."
Perhaps there could be some time stipend, so days may start a bit later and end sooner than 9-5.
Time stipend would he interesting, but Idk if it'd really gain traction, especially with more white collar work offering full remote.
"Many four-day-week employers don’t appear to be operating more efficiently, though, according to data from ActivTrak, a maker of workforce analytics software. Gabriela Mauch, vice president of ActivTrak’s productivity lab, suspects that is because management hasn’t revamped the way teams work."
I agree. It's just a shame that for the most part we're still using a lens that's so binary. I understand why say Fortune 500 companies are so slow to change. But why are the rest? If you're competing for talent - and nearly all companies are - and "we're on a 4-day workweek" would be appealing, why not do it?
On my last contract I worked 4 days x ~8.5 hrs with Fridays off. LOVED IT. I was more productive and never had to face "This client / project annoys the shit out of me...And even nore so on a Friday." There's nothing to be said for that ;)
At my workplace, this is how we ended up shifting to a 4-day work week. We were in a bit of a squeeze for hiring, and the last few candidates we had hired didn't end up working out.
We shifted to a 4-day work week and we have found we're getting higher quality applicants that would have presumably skipped over us for a more prestigious name, a company offering 4-day already, or whatever.
Not saying it's guaranteed to be the same for others, but it's worked remarkably well for us in our talent search.
It also could be dog-fooding. That is, how of is it, "We're innovative. We're pro-team...4DWW? What's that?"
The other thing is, not everyone wants Friday off. Therefore, the company can remain open 5 days, but not everyone is available all five days.
We rolled it out this way. Business is still open 5 days, roughly half the staff has Mondays off and the others have Fridays off. Staff have a "buddy" on the other schedule that they touch base with in case something needs to be taken care of on one of their days off.
The buddy idea is pure genius. Not only does it enable continuity, it's team building. This is the first time I hearing about such an idea...whoa.
That only works if you cancel the bullshit meetings, and empower your employees to say no to bullshit meetings.
For people that use the time to do errands, I suspect mid-week is better. I do wish we could settle on weekends though because the errands can be easily done on Friday or Tuesday or whatever, whereas a weekend trip cannot.
In the US most retail at least doesn't shut down on the weekend today. So a lot of companies having Friday off--which I see happening informally to some degree anyway (I almost never have a Friday meeting these days)--presumably wouldn't make a lot of difference. A day off in the middle of the week would mostly mean house chores for me without a real option to do a 3-day weekend which opens up a lot of possibilities.
while many have shared positive experiences, mine was quite the opposite. i did a 4-day work week for around 1.5 months and didn't find it to be beneficial at all. i went back to a 40-50 hour work week. i really love my work and want a lot more of it. not having a family also probably helps.
There has been a time in my life for each type of work arrangement, and there will be a time for retirement. Talking without that context is just going to result in talking past each other.
Yeah, that's the point. You shouldn't expect the same productivity. You should expect less. Just like in theory if we went back to a six day week we'd expect more productivity.
The change isn't expected to hold productivity, it's expected to make people's lives easier and take advantage of technological advantages. Go to a four day work week and you can expect the same productivity that you had 20 years ago at five days.
Nothing wrong with that, if reduced productivity is even true, but most studies refute that anyway.
The lowest answer was 8 hours. The highest answer was 15.
We can absolutely cut a day and lose no productivity. We already have a four-day workweek, we're just forcing people to spend a day of their de-facto three-day weekend in the office with their thumbs up their ass.
Most managers in most organizations *are* completely wasting a day a week. If they find that insulting, they should stop doing it.
Look no further than Amazon, with their we “feel” in person is better. They don’t care about the data, they care about the control.
Hmm, in my experience rarely anyone looks at a real productivity; you can thread water/even waste everyone else's time, but if you do it 5 days a week it's fine
at _current place_ after more than a year of exceeding the expectations (I got really good feedback from my peers and I pushed many projects forward) I asked for 1 day off a week as a form of a raise and I could reasonably justify it (I need my time off so I can stay productive in the long-run, I felt a little bit burnout at that stage); I only got big fat middle finger
obviously after that my productivity plummeted down to all-time-low, but seems like nobody really cares, so I stopped caring as well :)
To be fair I work more remotely than not these. If I had to commute in more often I'd almost certainly prefer 4-day workweeks.
The cost of having Fridays always off is a fair bit lower than 20% of actual hours worked in most 5-day-a-week workplaces.
The deciding factor is whether the difference in value generation is greater than the possible cost reduction you propose. That is a difficult question to give a definitive answer to, especially because there are large groups of people who want to spend as little mental effort as possible at work, to whom my personal preferences obviously don't apply.
TLDR: You bring up an interesting point. Thank you for your reply.
Same thing here - I enjoyed the day off, but 10 hours was definitely too long, and the day off wasn't really worth the trade off.
My current employer has "my mondays" - half the Mondays are days with no meetings, half are completely off. From an employee retention perspective this is a pretty sticky benefit - it would be difficult for me to go back to a normal schedule.
Working from Office, Working from home, hybrid- working hours, lunch hours.
you cant ever hope to satisfy everybody.
In my case for example, i bloody hate commuting, I feel like any work I do in a day eats disproportionately too much of my day (like going to the gym, where if you work out for 45 minutes you should allocate 90 minutes actually due to prep, shower, travel etc).
I’d much rather have longer fewer days.
I'm currently operating out of Finland as a software lead for a quite complex product (the displays on your bus/train that show you the next stop - a smorgasbord of bespoke hardware, embedded Linux, and everything you can imagine at the border of software and electrical engineering) and I keep a laser sharp eye on what hours I work so that I can efficiently communicate with my colleagues in North America. If I need to get ahold of my man in Chicago I thankfully have the clearance at work to come in an hour or two later in exchange for having an hour or two which matches his timezone. There's a golden window where my evenings wrap around to his mornings that I like to try to use for high bandwidth communication before I close out for the night.
This is why my stomach drops when this discussion turns into "the whole organization should shut down for another day". That's what I need a day off for. To go to doctor's appointments. To watch a contractor when he's working in my home. To talk to the lawyer planning my estate. Those people need to be working for me to get the full value of my extra day off.
I imagine you'd have to have a really stripped down warm up and cool down routine for such a role. 30 minutes to get into the flow, 3 hours flow state, 30 to step back down and do any documentation you needed to.
Work spilling over into extra days does happen during crunch times, but is much rarer. Though I likewise fear that 4 day work weeks would simply mean you end up working 8-8 everyday to get the same amount of stuff done.
I went on ADD meds (Dexedrine, 10mg) ohh 6 months ago. I used to be like you and now I'm the other way around - it's easier to Just Keep Going.
Note that I would totally support you getting "five sixes" (~30hours); I'm just finding it interesting that with the meds, for myself I'd now want "three tens" (or whatever).
PS - It helps a lot that I freakin' love working in Ruby/Rails, so I kinda... want to just keep going anyway.
I don't have ADD myself, however, and I find that even a stimulant as low grade as non-decaf coffee generally messes with my ability to stay focused. Different strokes, I guess.
Dexedrine feels like it (1) increased the "volume" on the outside world, so that it could compete with whatever's happening inside my head and (2) increased my ability to choose what I was focusing on.
Contrast with Adderral, which felt like cutting off my peripheral vision (like wearing blinders, or a costume mask), only for my sense of focus and awareness instead of literal vision. (I hated it).
Caffeine "just" ups overall energy levels, so it would give me more energy to direct focus... but it also amped up the things that would generate distractions.
Huberman Lad has a good episode going into the brain structures, which aligned with what I think I've experienced.
But yeah! It's well known (AFAIK) that people with ADD have "opposite reactions", although it's more about the complex engine under the hood.
Also free afternoons every day, better than a longer weekend.
I wanted more personal time, and I also needed more time to take care of my physical and mental health with appointments -- which all of my providers schedule during the 9-AM-to-5-PM period anyway -- and simple rest and relaxation. If I didn't have this schedule, there's a good chance I wouldn't still be at this current job or would have burned out earlier in general, and my contributions are valued, so it works out well for all parties involved.
But I don't think you have to justify it so concretely or morally -- you can just want to do a day's less formal work, or want to work toward a society with less work and more leisure time! The 40-hour work week is arbitrary, anyway.
We had somebody in a different timezone join the team and there was a long discussion about when we should do stand ups. I almost suggested just dropping it, but that would have been heresy.
Most people I know who are working under 30 hours a week do not qualify for important benefits such as health insurance.
Are you benefiting from a partner's income and health plan, or are you able to sustain yourself entirely on your own income?
And out of curiosity ... how do you spend the extra 4 days per week?
It probably helps to be a top performer and have years of experience. But if I were to be let go tomorrow, I'm sure it'll be difficult to find again. But I'm going to try! Never hurts to try when you know what you want.
I keep a low profile but the extra days per week are fun to fill! There does seem to be some sort of mental flip between 3 days and 4 days because I know that the majority of my week is whatever I want to do versus the majority (or vast majority) being work.
The point of working less is for people to have more personal time without this impacting their livelihood. There are many well-studied benefits of this[1], both to workers and companies, yet greedy companies still cling to archaic practices to squeeze as much profits as possible out of each employee.
Even after considerable productivity increases gained in part by automation and technology, we've seen decades of wage stagnation and an increasing productivity-pay gap[2,3,4]. Workers have lived with this short end of the stick for far too long, and the least controversial step forward would be to make the 4 day work week without pay reduction a general policy in all companies in nonessential industries. There are industries that need to operate with longer schedules, and those positions should be compensated accordingly, but most IT companies can certainly operate with much less than 5 days per week.
[1]: https://time.com/6256741/four-day-work-week-benefits/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_produ...
[3]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
Of course, this productivity can only be squeezed into only so small a frame, but I think what we're learning is that 40 hours is probably not the maxima for efficiency.
The simplest way to have more efficient workers is to make them happy. I don't have a panacea for that problem, but giving them an extra day for leisure sure doesn't hurt when possible. But more than that, companies rarely ask and listen to employees about what they want/need, and there's so much social pressure that people seldom speak up. Fundamentally this is a cultural problem.
What's interesting about 4d weeks is that it's 20% less work but 50% more days off, which can be very impactful for folks.
Our 80% option is a flexible thing, as in you can choose to do it for the summer but not the rest of the year. We try to adjust workloads accordingly. I've taken advantage of it myself for a period of time and it gave me more free time to be with family and also work on side projects.
Some people really love taking our 80% option / 4d and others absolutely don't want to.
Companies offering flexibility in work hours can really help retention IMO, and is a natural progression after (a) remote / freedom of location, and (b) freedom of specific work schedule.
I know a few companies offer "4-day week summers" to everybody or even "everyone always does 4-day weeks". But I like the "fairness" of giving people an option, since different people are in different life situations at different times where working more vs. less can be especially helpful.
I'm surprised I've never heard of this solution before. I think it's brilliant, especially for engineering roles where we can still make rent on 80% pay.
I would gladly move back and forth between the options as I get more or less burnt out with work, or take on a new extra curricular.
I prefer a five day workweek with shorter days because I rarely have 8 good hours in me. That, and as long as the rest of the world is working 5 days a week it’s easier to conform.
I usually start anywhere from 8-10, work until around 12-1, get some chores done/eat something/work out, work until around 4-6. Some days there's more in the tank or whatever problem is interesting and I can't put the laptop down. Some days I'm done by 3 pm because I'm not getting anything done. And sometimes it's like 8 pm on a Sunday and I have a great idea about how to solve something so I pick up the laptop.
Of course it is not a silver bullet but spreading awareness is a good step.
I'm also amazed at how variable an hour can be in terms of output. I can easily do 5-10x work at my best compared to my worst. The key here is being completely in the zone, and not trying to do it all the time.
I believe a 4-day work week could help put more people in that productive zone,resulting in as much/more output for less hours spent. Of course, you have to have employees trusting enough and stable enough to use the extra time to decompress.
In case you reduce your pay by 20% to accommodate for fewer hours, in many countries with progressive tax rates, the effect on take-home pay in absolute terms is not as significant as relative.
For example, in Germany, 100K gross leaves you with 57 after tax. Whereas 80K results in ~47k. In absolute terms, it is 'just 10k less', on a salary of 57k, but with 20% less working hours.
The trend is going the OPPOSITE direction- corporate overlords want us all back in the office where they can see us.
Change won’t happen through writing and sharing these articles… we already all know 4-day workweek is a no-brainer. Strike. Resign. Unionize.
1) start a business 2) become a contractor/consultant. You can charge much more than a regular job and cut hours to get paid the same amount as you did before. I've been a consultant for 10 years and almost never work 40 hours. If I do, it's on my side-business and it's by choice.
The problem with these 4-day work weeks is that you are imposing your lifestyle changes on potential employers by expecting to get paid more for working less. It's a losing battle and will most-likely only be temporary, like remote work (I've been remote for 10+ years and it's written into my contracts).
Meanwhile, consulting similarly requires specialized and/or significant knowledge/value to bring to a business. People who can do either probably are already in a position where they don't rely on full time income to survive.
>The problem with these 4-day work weeks is that you are imposing your lifestyle changes on potential employers by expecting to get paid more for working less. It's a losing battle and will most-likely only be temporary, like remote work
1. I woildnt mind the option even with reduced salary. Especially as my salary grows (80% of 150% of my salary is still 20% more of my current salary. And I live very comfortably t on begin with). I wouldn't even mind 4 10 hour days. But few offer it to begin with. Some progress there would be nice.
2. I don't see remote work as temporary. Pre-pandemic I'd say 80% of companies in my industry expected on-site full time and requesting wfh was like pulling teeth. 3 years later that more or less flipped; so many companies advertise remote first even if all the big employers are RTO'ing.
I hope for a similar revolution with 4 day work weeks.
Why should an employer always be able to impose their desires on my lifestyle and not the other way around? Ultimately it's just another piece of negotiation, like pay, PTO, remote, etc.
It depends on your leverage. If you have a skillset that very few other people possess and the potential employer needs you, sure.
If you are an amazon warehouse worker that can easily be replaced, good luck.
They work 4 10 hour days a week.
There's just no way to balance that kind of schedule and children. I was very frank when I responded to the recruiter.
This is probably true for most ICs, and false for most managers/execs. Hence the tension.
It's a maximum.
I was always refreshed and motivated, and it was trivially easy to be productive and effective during the 4 hours I was working. After starting a regular 9-5, I've never felt the same kind of productivity, because I am never as rested and refreshed.
I sincerely hope that fails as well.
Kind of like squeezing all your clothing from two closets into one won't make your room feel less cramped unless you cut half your clothing as well. Most people could do without that extra half and be better for it.
Seems like a nightmare for working with other companies if the employees are off on a day you are not, and you need to contact them to work on something with them.
I totally understand the urge (and suggestion) to not work too much on the other hand.
Many hard problems are solved by the thinking deeply about a problem, consistently over the long period of time.
Your brain isn't any different from physical muscles; it needs rest and can be overextended. Muscles need time to repair and reinforce tendons after a workout. Meanwhile, practice requires rest so your mind has time to form connections and store new knowledge in long term memory.
There's been many situations where I threw myself at a problem for over a day, only to wake up the next morning and solve my blocker in under an hour.
also, many companies treat fridays (second half at least) as a write off for routine work as it is, and it does not practically lead to more productivity imo.
I feel it insulting that we need justify keeping the level of productivity with a shorter working week, while the change in process and tooling that boosted productivity were never adopted to make the sake of the working class but for the benefit of the powerful, its time to make it a law
My industry has hugely benefited from the technological productivity boost and in response has gradually increased our working hours over the years. We usually work 60-90 hour weeks now (50 hours is the absolute minimum we ever work a week) and are doing a lot more and making way less than we did in the past. We make pretty decent money, but only because of our absurd overtime, so some people in the industry are actually against reducing our hours to a more reasonable 40 because it will substantially decrease their take home pay.
And with inflation eating into our wages, we make less and less every year. We aren’t saving lives here or anything. The only reason we have to work these hours is to save our bosses money.
We pay with our valuable time so they get more time to enjoy their yachts.
The government can't really solve this anymore, because corporations control the politicians and public opinion through the media.
The only real solution is, in my view, revolt. But the majority (like myself) are also way too comfortable to risk anything drastic, so the status quo will persist for the time being.
I tend to agree with this. My prediction is the capitalists will continue to extract more and more resources from the working class for the next 50-60 years until there is a breaking point. After some violence, society will swing back to prioritizing workers' rights, then regulations will be eroded slowly over another 100-200 years as people forget what it was like, and the cycle continues until the earth is no longer habitable.
and you also have the nickname of a guy who enjoyed simple stuff, enjoyed taking care of his time, criticising those who would call the servants for dinners.. I guess it's just that modern society is about showing off without understanding a dick